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Back to Square One
Nothing has been said here for some time. I’m back here to make amends (with whom? the crickets ask me chirpily). Whenever I try to get back to writing after a long while, the gate-keeping thought is : “Of what use will your words be? Will they be useful to someone?”.
On some level, I know that it shouldn’t matter. I mean, it is literally mah domain, mah rulezz. But I acquiesce to this utilitarian demon just this once, because a sloth demon needs to be slain.
Back to square one. Maybe not quite. Being here reminds me of the feeling I get when a snake brings me down from 96 to 3 in a snakes & ladders board game. My writing muscles have regressed and atrophied yet again and the only way to get back up is to thrash my fingertips over my keyboard.
Up until early 2020, I could not, for the life of me, find any value in running. People who’d come to the football pitch and just run circles always perplexed me. At best, they’d end up where they started, square one and panting. Stamina wasn’t prized among my peers when I was growing up because most (including me) had just enough to play leisurely games of cricket and football/futbol/soccer. On running, my thought process was (pseudo) utilitarian. What was the point of running?
It wasn’t until I fell into an abyss hitherto undescended, that I searched for ways to get out which were cost-effective and read in an article that running was the closest in physiological affect to Ritalin. And then I conjured up a pair of shoes, a headband and sunglasses and ran into the morning sun like old Seabiscuit.
I saw this baddie on Reddit at that time and I thought to myself, “Damn, I’d like to do that”. Even if I didn’t start running then, this video stayed with me. Nope, instead I shirked away from running and meandered through grey days until a friend (now a great friend) called me up and asked me if I wanted to go running with him on the beach. I was hesitant at first but I accepted to try it out because I was tired of my routine, everything I was doing then seemed to keep me down. I was apprehensive of buying shoes to run, thinking that they might be underused. But one could run on the beach barefoot. I could just wear some old soccer jerseys so I didn’t need to buy new clothes either. All I had to follow my friend. And follow I did.
I’ve been running ever since. Along the way, another friend suggested that I record my runs on a tracking app. Again, I was concerned about losing out on the purity of my running experience, but then again, I liked to listen to blaring music from my earphones while running, so how ‘pure’ was I really? Once I started recording, it did feel assuring to look back on these recorded runs because I would have forgotten and discounted them otherwise, being in the state of mind that I was.
As I’ve been mentioned before, exercising in public is an exercise in building self-confidence. When I began road-running, I had intrusive loud thoughts worrying about what people thought of me when they made eye contact with me, why’s he running, is he in danger, why is his gait so strange, why is he running if he’s so out-of-breath, why does it look like he’s struggling and so on. If you start to move your body in ways you haven’t in public, that is a practice of not-giving-a-fuck. We were made to move, and we were made to feel good while doing it (give it a few minutes though).
Getting into running had a butterfly effect of going back to resistance training too eventually (something I used to beat myself up about when I was in the dark and not moving at all), although I struggle on a higher plane of consistency still. It also reminded me that I took breathing outside air for granted, or even breathing in general, how it could be controlled for intended calming or energizing effects.
I run in loops nearly every week and I come back to
squarespiral one all the time now. You just have to think of it like an upward spiral. With every step (walk, jog or run), the pain will come but so will the strength to bear it. -
Cultivating confidence with movement
In the past few years, I’ve been understanding just how important physical activity can be in developing confidence.
Now, confidence is a big word. And it is certainly dimensional. One could be adept at public speaking but be demure while negotiating prices. Each is it’s own challenge. One could pen a novella in a week but freeze up while trying to reply with nuance and depth on the internet.
In my experience, in my fortunate experience of possessing four roving functional limbs and a head that didn’t take one too many knocks, I’ve found that I started to care less about what others perceive of me when I exercised in front of them.
As a child playing with your friends, this comes quite naturally. Brimming with glee as you run from ‘it’, you make eye contact with a towering adult. You flash him a smile, because you’re in a thrill, running and having fun. The adult might smile back or just avert your gaze and move on. As a kid, you might feel a little strange, thinking to yourself, why was he looking so desolate, was everything okay?
Now, you’re it. Fast forward to your adulthood, you’re sick of being/feeling trapped in your room and you decide to go to the park, if only to breath in the cool invigorating morning air, and hear the fauna stirring. You reach the park and realize that you forgot your water bottle. Your perfect workout is already done with. It’s okay. Nothing is perfect. Nothing ever was.
As you do some random wavy movements which excuses as a warmup, you feel out-of-place and you can hear some people in a group sniggering behind you . Are they laughing at you? Have they noticed the hole in your trousers in the left shin?
They’ll be gone after this and you’ll never see them again. Even if you do, it won’t matter. You decide to start small. There are a few metal bar supports, foam platforms and benches in the park, using which you perform some knee-pushups, some bench dips, some horizontal rows, maybe three chin-ups and some squats.
As you begin your set, you hear your bones creak and groan. As you push and pull, you feel a searing pain coming from within your muscle, but you want to know how far you can go and you try to push for just one more. The pain overwhelms you and you take a pause. Following this pain, there come immediately waves of relaxation. You breathe deeply and you look around. People are happy with or without you. And for some time, so are you.
In recent times, exercising in a public gym, exercising in parks and running on the roadside has forged some steel in me. People might look at me quizzically or with disdain, and I stare right back, indicating with my eyes: “This is me and this is what I do. Now fuck off”. Maybe there’s something about moving your body in front of others without a care in the world that imbibes conviction.
If you are fortunate to possess and maintain a functioning body, I urge you to start moving. Gently at first, in fact gently for a very long while and then … all at once.
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I’ve never really tried to make myself feel understood
And this space is a start in that direction.
If you want to feel that you are heard, you must speak up. And you should try to speak in ways that make it easier or more comprehensible for the other to understand.
Who is the other? Well, it’s you, you beautiful person you. And it’s me.
Mostly, it’s going to be me.
I’ve been quietly gorging on the smorgasbord of thought-food that is the internet, for a while now. While I considered it wise on my part to not participate in social media extensively throughout my growing years (I had brief stints of activity for a few months on facebook, instagram and reddit), I have still developed an attachment to consuming media content and that this content has gotten smaller and shallower. And I feel like I don’t think deeper thoughts about anything, like I used to, when I read more deeply.
And I’m dismayed that there is a profit incentive everywhere. There’s a lot of clutter. And goddammit if I get into another hour long whirlpool of YouTube Shorts, so help me god I will lose my shit. This blog is where I can choose to be myself, with everything else stripped away.
I am not myself these days. Haven’t been so for a long time now. Well, less so than before writing this. What do I mean by not being myself? I think that because of my depression I became a reclusive of sorts, the kind that did not want to wade into any conversation, even if I could contribute something meaningful. The mood could be summed up with this motto of our zeitgeist: “I can’t even”.
So this is where I start.
To be frank, I felt like shit when I started writing this and now it feels okay, much like exercising.
I know not what will come of this. But I’m going to stop worrying about how this blog can help end world war 3 and just …write.
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Public Journal of a Private Man 